The Remembered Gate: Memoirs by Alabama Writers

In The Remembered Gate, prominent fiction writers, essayists, and poets recall how their formative years in Alabama shaped them as people and as writers. The essays range in tone from the pained and sorrowful to the wistful and playful, in class from the privileged to the poverty-stricken, in geography from the rural to the urban, and in time from the first years of the 20th century to the height of the civil rights era and beyond. We see how the individual artists came to understand something central about themselves and their art from a changing Alabama landscape. Whether from the perspective of C. Eric Lincoln, beaten for his presumption as a young man asking for pay for his labors, or of Judith Hilman Paterson, floundering in her unresolved relationship with her troubled family, these renderings are personal and intense. Library Journal notes that, in each of the entries, an enduring sense of place [emerges]. Fannie Flagg's The Truth the Heart Knows' is a love song to the people of the state, while Mary Ward Brown's 'Swing Low: A Memoir' is the story of a long-lasting friendship between a white woman and black man in the years before the civil rights movement. Noted critic/poet Albert Murray...describes how he wanted to create literature of interest to 'the world at large.'